Michigan came in at No. 4, and Michigan State was No. 7. Other Big Ten teams ranked highly included Ohio State at No. 1, Wisconsin at No. 8, Nebraska at No. 14, Iowa at No. 15, Maryland at No. 17 and Purdue at No. 20.

"The NCAA Evaluation Tool, which will be known as the NET, relies on game results, strength of schedule, game location, scoring margin, net offensive and defensive efficiency, and the quality of wins and losses," the NCAA wrote. "To make sense of team performance data, late-season games (including from the NCAA tournament) were used as test sets to develop a ranking model leveraging machine learning techniques.

"The model, which used team performance data to predict the outcome of games in test sets, was optimized until it was as accurate as possible. The resulting model is the one that will be used as the NET going forward."